When I think of what has become of Nelson Mandela, a piece of me dies inside. I don’t mean the flesh-and-blood man who departed this world a decade ago. I mean what those who keep his memory alive have done to his reputation.
On his birthday two weeks ago, I listened to what radio newsreaders were saying about him. Somebody had started a charity for blind homeless people, if I remember correctly, and had especially launched the initiative on his birthday. President Cyril Ramaphosa said something about how in the spirit of Mandela we must aspire for nonracialism and inclusivity.
Charities are hugely important, and a SA that embraces all who live in it is sacred. Who would quibble with either of those things? But that is precisely the point. Nelson Mandela is the one who does not offend, the emblem of all that is nice. And for precisely that reason he ends up offending a lot of people deeply.
For what Mandela has in essence become is a Potemkin village wheeled out to service a tired and battered political order. He is the cardboard façade of a happy place concealing a hinterland in which people are weary and wounded and a little afraid.
That is why many young people are annoyed with Mandela or are indifferent to him or regard him as a familiar figure in an uninspiring landscape. He has been made the totem of a world many would like to change.
How ironic that is, for the real Nelson Mandela was an unusual and intensely interesting man. For one, he was not an idealist at all. His view of human beings was in fact a little grim. He believed that we were as liable to make war as peace. And since we are an overly proud species, our dignity easily wounded, we do not recover quickly from war. The memories of pain linger for generations, the sense of affront and the need for revenge live on.
This is what Mandela saw all over South African history. He understood the rise of Afrikaner nationalism as a legacy of the concentration camps. He observed the brutal killings during the Mpondo Rebellion of 1960 and wondered whether his wife Winnie Madikizela’s people would ever live together in peace again. He saw the slaughter of people during the Defiance Campaign and asked whether fighting apartheid should not be left to a professional army.
When he was freed from prison in 1990, his vision for his country revealed the same wariness, the same fear. He had no plan to mend our souls, no vision for an inner transformation. He was not a Martin Luther King who thought that for black and white people to live together they needed to change inside.
Democracy and peace?
What he hoped for was more modest and pragmatic. Could SA have both democracy and peace? Could the country transition to genuine majority rule without going to war? That is the question that preoccupied him.
He threw everything he had at ensuring that the answer would be yes. He knew not just that he was a brilliant performer but that he had the versatility to perform a thousand roles. He had played the dapper bourgeois lawyer, the underground revolutionary, the dignified martyr. Could he now put on a performance effective enough to exude a spirit of peace?
Before each public appearance he primed himself; he wound himself up. And what he endeavoured to perform was warmth. His most effective weapon against the prospect of war, he believed, was laughter. And he was pretty damn good at it, especially since it hardly expressed what was going on inside him. Privately, he felt a little broken; those 27 years away from life had taken their toll.
The real Nelson Mandela, as opposed to the cardboard cut-out, is a perfect fit for his country. How appropriate that in this hard, hard land, full of anger and grievance and pain, the most effective of its leaders was a wary man, so very afraid of the blood not yet spilled.
• Steinberg is the author of ‘Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage’.
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